1979 and three boys are living a mundane existence as the final residents in a group home in the New Forest. They're intermittently ill with a bug and have to take medication but otherwise they're enjoying life and waiting till they're well enough to go to a glorious seaside home and spend their days living it up in an amusement park.

Nancy is doted on by her ageing parents who dress her up and treat her like a doll in their home that's overcrowded with mail order junk. She's a virtual prisoner and is never allowed to leave.

Chidgey is a mastermind at subtle chills. Everything is hum drum and pedestrian but underneath all this is an unsettling sense of growing menace as you realise that nothing about these children's lives is wholesome or healthy and that there are undercurrents of darkness. The world we're shown is comforting and familiar but also disturbingly dystopian. It's skilled writing to depict such ordinariness but make it so full of creeping threat. Its a masterclass in subtext and unease. Truly chilling.

This reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro at his best. The first person narration from the children works well as a device and I felt wholly present in their worlds. The sense of time and place is exquisite and the slightly off kilter late 1970s world works perfectly. Gloriously unsettling.

This is already one of my books of the year for 2025. A treat of a read that I devoured in a couple of days. A definite future classic.